Gore Vidal (76 page)

From the bedroom window, from the octagonal study, from the perspective of the French doors that looked out on the lawn, from almost every angle and position, the river was there, the hazy blue Catskills in the distance. Friends came up by train from New York, for the day or overnight. Jean Stein, ten years younger than Gore, Doris and Jules's daughter, whom he had last seen as a young girl in Los Angeles, stayed overnight. Claire Bloom visited. She was astounded at how Gore seemed simply not to hear the train roar by. Sam Lurie, who had briefly been on retainer as Gore's press agent, came up with his companion and co-worker, Stanley Kaminsky, who recollected “being awakened at about two in the morning after having gone to bed and suddenly being … terrified. I thought it was an earthquake.” In the octagonal study Gore labored on a new play, a development of his Civil War teleplay
Honor
, which he began to revise for full-length stage presentation, somehow preferring to do that than to work any further either on
Washington, D.C
., or
Julian
, perhaps because he expected that
MGM, to whom he was still under contract, would soon give him a new assignment. The telescript about his grandfather that he had promised Manulis was still on hold.

In Manhattan, Howard and Nina had made the one-bedroom apartment at 360 East Fifty-fifth Street comfortable, a place where both men stayed and where they sometimes entertained. It was considered Howard's apartment. Miles White down the hall had windows facing their bedroom window across the courtyard. When Gore hosted a party, they often made room by putting the coats in Miles's apartment. Oliver Smith, with his tall, lithe, handsome figure, his blond—now white—hair, was regularly in sight with Sam Lurie and other ballet people. Paul Bowles still occasionally came to New York. One evening Gore and Howard went to a party hosted by Cecil Beaton at which naked, muscular young men had been hired to serve drinks and exhibit their bodies. Theater and movie friends were around, and Gore began now to be a regular at “The Party,” the gatherings of the elite of the New York and Los Angeles entertainment worlds, a movable celebrity feast, the world that Latouche had introduced him to, the world to which his television plays, his Broadway success, and his Hollywood status now gave him full entrée. His youth, his handsomeness, his wit were welcome, the attraction of his being both an intellectual
and
a celebrity. The Party's shifting and simultaneous forms flowed to both sides of the continent, many of the people the same. Doris and Jules Stein in Los Angeles were one of the focal points. The actress Ruth Ford's apartment at the Dakota in Manhattan was another. In New York the partygoers always gathered for Noël Coward's regular visits from London. Gore was delighted to meet him.
Visit to a Small Planet
was still running. The expectation was that he would write another play, that he would compete with George Axelrod (and, at some remove, with Coward himself) for Broadway's crown. As a successful playwright, he now began to make television-talk-show appearances, mostly to push
Visit
, among them
Today
with David Garroway, Jack Paar's
Tonight Show
, and David Susskind's various talk programs.

The unavoidable assignment from MGM came late that fall. It had the advantage, unexpectedly, of requiring his presence in London, where his adaptation of the bestselling novelist Daphne Du Maurier's
The Scapegoat
would be filmed, under the aegis of the head of MGM's British production at their Ealing Studio, Sir Michael Balcon, the man who had given Hitchcock his start and also who had been responsible for what came to be known as
the Ealing comedies. The well-known director of
Kind Hearts and Coronets
, Robert Hamer, would again have his friend Alec Guinness, who in
Kind Hearts
had proved himself the master of multiple roles, for the dual-character starring role; Bette Davis, whom Gore persuaded to take the part, and Irene Worth were set for the important female leads. MGM had wanted Cary Grant for the film. Du Maurier and Guinness, whom Du Maurier insisted on because she thought he resembled her father, had formed a limited partnership to do the film. Soon thinking better of doing it themselves, they persuaded MGM to back and release it. When a first screenplay proved unsatisfactory, MGM decided that Gore would be the right person for the task. Kenneth Tynan, whom Balcon had hired early in 1956 as his script director at Ealing Studios, had probably either raised Vidal's name or added his enthusiasm when MGM had queried Balcon about assigning Vidal to the script. It was a far better, more interesting, and prestigious assignment than anything he had been offered before, a sign of MGM's confidence that the thirty-two-year-old writer could hold his own in such company. In early November he sailed to England, first for consultations, then for work. On the
Queen Mary
, his first-class ticket paid for by MGM, he dined regularly in the Grill, undeterred by the stormy weather, on what seemed to him the best food he had ever eaten. Just before leaving, he had gotten a copy of the novel and read it for the first time.

As usual, as soon as he arrived in London, he quickly got to work creating a script, which he felt confident he could do successfully, though he soon discovered that Du Maurier had strong ideas about how it should be done. The author of
Rebecca
, a novel Gore had thought “ravishing” at thirteen and which had been made into a successful movie, Du Maurier exercised considerable influence on the filming and was “unconsciously condescending” to him. “I came to know what an experienced butler must feel in a stately home. I was, she would say to others, ‘the hack from Hollywood,' which was not too far off the mark.” On the side, Gore and Hamer made parodic fun of Du Maurier's prose. But he managed to create a workable screenplay that, when it opened the next spring in New York, was praised more for its successful moments than for its overall achievement. In the editing Bette Davis's role was gradually cut to an extended cameo appearance, for which she blamed Guinness. Guinness himself had his hands full with the domineering Du Maurier and with his gradual assumption of Hamer's responsibilities as the director's heavy drinking, which everyone on
the set tried to cover for, eventually disabled him. With the droll, cynical Hamer, during one of his better weeks before the filming started, and with Maria Britneva, whom Gore had invited along, he went to France, searching for a filming location. They spent some icy, wintry days in Le Mans. Maria was her usual manic, effervescent company. They ate well, and Hamer drank, pulling a flask from his pocket as they drove, toasting the “
winter wonderland
.” Though Gore was to leave before the actual filming began, he and others covered as best they could for Hamer, and when later Hamer made some changes in the script, Gore did not mind, partly because he had little enthusiasm for the script in general. “I would have been delighted if Robert got
all
the credit.”

Staying in luxury again at Claridge's in late November and December, Gore and the Tynans resumed and increased the good fellowship that had begun the previous spring, though the strongest current of affection soon flowed between Gore and Elaine rather than Gore and Ken. As often, Gore's delight in attractive, witty, luminescent women, his combination of empathetic and principled support—especially in Elaine's case for her work as a writer—created a mutual enchantment. His hard, biting, often hilariously perceptive humor fascinated her. She admired his unsentimentally objective view of people and the world, so different from the self-pitying subjectivity of her husband and most of the men she knew. At the same time she felt Gore's capacity for friendship, for loyalty, for unhesitating supportiveness. At work on her first novel,
The Dud Avocado
, to be published the next year, she appreciated his encouragement, his helpful suggestions. The contrast with Ken was both liberating and additionally discomfiting, a signifier of the long-standing and increasing tension between husband and wife. When Ken discovered that his wife was writing a novel, he whined, “But when I married you, you weren't a writer.” Both found Gore attractive, fascinating, accomplished. When Gore, who was picked up each day by car for the drive to Ealing, invited Tynan to ride with him to the studio, Ken, for whom early-morning hours were bleary-eyed, incoherent, and coffee-driven, reported to Elaine that the experience was totally unnerving. At that hour of the morning Gore spoke in clearly enunciated, fully formed sentences.

Four years older than Gore, the daughter of a well-to-do New York Polish-Jewish immigrant family, the beneficiary of a liberal education and increasingly liberated from the cultural and sexual restrictions of her parents' world, Elaine had moved to Paris in 1949. She was interested in acting
and painting. Dark-haired, sensuously engaging, energetic and nervously talkative, she was a lively presence. In 1950, on a London visit, she met the tall, flamboyant, stuttering, self-dramatizing young theater critic. Two weeks later Tynan asked her to marry him. “I am the illegitimate son of the late Sir Peter Peacock. I have an income of X pounds per year. I'm 23, and I will either die or kill myself when I reach 30 because by then I will have said everything I have to say. Will you marry me?” Three months later she cabled her Park Avenue family, “‘Have married Englishman. Letter follows.'” Born in Birmingham, the illegitimate son of a bigamous father, Tynan was a volatile combination of brilliance and histrionic insecurity. A great success in the Oxford University theatrical world, always eager to hold court, which he did with wit and riveting sartorial flamboyance, Tynan was an Oscar Wilde of sorts, though without the talent and artistic discipline. His stutter seemed an almost emblematic flaw. Handsomely sensual, with a high-pitched attention-demanding voice, he had a touch of the theatrical queen. He wore bright clothes, odd color combinations, and a Mickey Mouse wristwatch before these had become a lifestyle statement. Always personally onstage, more than anything he wanted to be noticed. Everything about the theater interested him—acting, directing, producing, evaluating. But what most engaged his frenetic energy was being a celebrity, someone to be noticed and reckoned with in that most publicly defined of all artistic provinces, the theater. He had great skill with language, less with people. Alec Guinness readily admitted that Tynan's reviews were wonderful unless you happened to be the subject of them. Turned on sexually by light spanking of women, emotionally frivolous and irresponsible, by 1958, at the age of thirty-one, he had become Britain's premiere chastiser of theatrical performances, the widely read reviewer for
The Observer
, a witty critic well suited to the role but at odds with his own conflicting compulsion to be of the moment and at the same time to do something more enduring. He had essentially recognized, though, that he did best with short pieces. He was neither personally nor professionally suited for the long haul.

Days were spent at the Ealing Studios at Elstree, evenings at Claridge's and with London friends. The American ambassador, John Hay Whitney, with whom Gore had a tenuous connection through Nina and Whitney's former wife, invited him to an embassy function. He ran into a presence from the past, Cornelia Claiborne's mother, who was also staying at the hotel and en route to visiting her daughter, who had married an
Englishman. There were marital problems, for which she blamed her son-in-law. “She was going down to the country” to see them, Gore recalled, “and she was debating—she talked with a very tough Virginia accent—about the possibilities of smuggling a gun into the house and taking care of him, murdering her son-in-law.” A movie deal was in the process of being made for
Visit to a Small Planet
, and Eric Burger, an American professor of German literature with extensive contacts in the German publishing and theater world, had been at work successfully since August arranging a Berlin production of the play, which had been in rehearsal since early December. For the premiere on December 23 at the Renaissance Theater, Gore flew to Berlin, his first visit to Germany, where he spoke at a fireside discussion on American literature for a group of fifteen German writers, the talk arranged by the Berlin Cultural Affairs branch of the United States Information Service. The movie negotiations had gotten under way before he had left New York. Abe Lastfogel at William Morris, whom Gore had met socially in New York and who had handled the deal, cabled him that they had been successful in holding out for $150,000. The film, for which Gore did not write the script and over which he had no control, would star Jerry Lewis and be a critical and commercial disaster, an exemplification of the ongoing problem of Hollywood for the novelist or playwright, which has resulted in the widespread wisdom that the best thing to happen is that Hollywood pay vast sums for rights, then
not
make the film.

A London theatrical run for
Visit
seemed likely, at least at first, both to Gore and to Hugh (Binkie) Beaumont, a top London theatrical producer. Gore was skeptical about Beaumont, who was enamored of star actors, thought little of writers and directors, and already had a long history of failed British productions of American plays, especially Tennessee Williams's. But most roads to a West End production went through Beaumont. Fortunately, the stellar British actor Robert Morley was interested in playing Kreton. But he insisted as a condition of his commitment that the American aspects of the play be transposed into their nearest British equivalents. While he was in London for
The Scapegoat
, Gore had numbers of discussions with Morley, which made clear that he would pay a heavy price for Morley's commitment: Morley demanded 50 percent of the royalties and that he himself Britishize the text. Gore loved Morley as an actor. He seemed right for the part. Offering to revise it himself, he quickly produced a version for the British stage. “‘This will never do,' Morley said. ‘Let me do
it, and it will be so much easier for you, and I know how the jokes should go.' A lot of American humor, though, was unknown to him, and I said, ‘Do you mind if I mark the play where we get a laugh?' He thought this was outrageous. ‘How do you know where you'll get a laugh?' I said, ‘Well, it's been running a year or two. There are five or six companies out there playing it somewhere or other. Of course I know where the laughs are. It's a good idea, if you're going to play it, that you should know what's funny, since it may not occur to you what in the American style is funny.” He soon sounded out Alec Guinness as an alternative. Guinness, though, did not think the role suitable for him. “
I do agree
that the tone of Kreton's dialogue is resolutely frivolous,” Gore responded, “entirely Cyril, and hardly you. But there are many different ways of playing the part.” Guinness firmly declined. Since without a well-known star there would be no production, it was Morley or no one. From New York, Clinton Wilder and George Axelrod urged Gore to be flexible, which he did his best to be. “As I am interested only in art,” Axelrod joked, “and you are interested only in money (which means we have the same ends at heart), I must strongly urge you to give this serious consideration. Should you prove recalcitrant, I shall be obliged to recall you to the States for further brain-washing in the Green Room…. We can make a bundle in London and I am absolutely sure this is the way to do it.” To their bitter disappointment, by late 1958, despite attempts to find common ground, Gore ended the negotiations. He could contemplate forgoing a portion of his royalties, but the notion of giving up control of his words to Morley's revisions he found unacceptable.